I'm currently buying the following heavy-duty workstation for a professor:

SilverStone Tenjim TJ10 (Black with Side Window)
Enermax Galaxy 850W PSU
2x Xeon X5472 3.0Ghz 1600Mhz FSB Quad-Core
16x 1GB Kingston DDR2-800 FB-DIMM
Tyan Tempest i5400PW (S5397) Motherboard
2x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200.10 Hard Drives
2x Thermalright HR-01-X
Dedicated nVidia Video Card (something 8x00-based)
Zalman FB-123 Cooling (with a fan holder!)
7x Enermax Marathon 120mm Fan

Pretty nice, huh?

One of the Enermax fans will be placed directly on top of the 16 FB-DIMMs with the Zalman fan holder. The 92mm fan won't be used, I'm buying the FB-123 for the fan holder alone. I think it was the easiest way to cool the memory. Also, I'll replace the stock case fans for these.

What do you guys think?

Also, here's a very important question: which OS should I use? Will, say, Ubuntu 7.10 work out of the box? I couldn't find any more info in Tyan's website... I'm thinking about checking with them, but their support forums seem to be offline right now. I'll try later, but if anyone has any info regarding OS support and has any input to give, I'd appreciate it!

Pant, pant, pant...

I havent droled so much since the last time I watched Pam and Tommy.

Have you cheked out the Tyan Tempest i5400PW to make triple and quadrople sure that its BIOS is happy with the Penryns?

Only other queston I have is are you sure tha the 2 x Thermalright HR-01-X will fit side by side? Those sockets look prety damn close to each other!

Also a tiny bit of advice. You're spending huge bux here, so why not spend another $16 on HDs and go with 2 x 500 7200.11s? I think youd be much hapier on a system like this.

Keep us posted on how its goin, as I may jsut decide in the next ten days til WolfieDay to copy you and do:

2x Xeon X5472 3.0Ghz 1600Mhz FSB Quad-Core (might go down to E5420 to save huge bux)
8 GB of Something DDR2-800 FB-DIMM
Tyan Tempest i5400PW (S5397) Motherboard (Id love to find a cheaper one! boo hoo)
Some Seasonic 750 or so PSU
2x Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Hard Drives
2x Some big muther HSF that will fit
8800GT
Got a case with 250mm fan in and 2 x 120mm out

All I have to do is rob a few ATMs in the next week and a hafl!

Edit: What are the OC possibilties for the Tyan?

all those processing power just to watch porn. a look back at tommy and pam would be sweetest there hehe..

since its a workstation, shouldnt it have the quadros/fireGL?i mean come on, you aint building an F1 car that runs on diesel will you? so as a workstation with gaming GPUS

I would be very interested in the Penryn certification for the Tyan i5400PW motherboard. Is there another way to derive this info as it does not seem to be listed on the Tyan website?

Hey, I want my pron in crystal clear HD! Want to see each bulgng vein!

I cant tell you what the prof is gonna use it for, but for me the 8800GT would be more than fine. I dont game.

Not really. You could confgure a Q9550 system with a really good mobo for about the same money. But this is a octopus!

Well, there is less info than what I'd like on that i5400PW Motherboard, and that's not only the penryn certification. For instance, I'd really like to know what OS I can definitely run on it. I'm under the impression that any good and latest distro should work, but I'm very afraid that that will not be so.

What I do know from Tyan's website is that (a) this motherboard supports the E5462 Xeon @ 2.8Ghz and (b) this motherboard has been validated to operate with these 1GB DDR2-800 FB-DIMM Kingston modules.

I think that supporting the E5462 is a sign that the other Penryns are supported. As for the memory, that should work flawlessly.

I think I will send a forum message/mail directly to Tyan to ask for OS support and CPU support. After all, this is a brand new motherboard. It's probably the easiest way! The manufacturer should know. Question is, will they take their time to answering all my questions?

As for the quadros/FireGL, this will be a programming workstation, and as such the dedicated 8x00 series video card is just so it can run a little graphics. There will be no serious image editing or 3D model manipulation going on here... All we need is the raw firepower. And there's a lot of it in this machine!!!

The statment that the mobo supports the E5462 is really good since I cant see how it would be fine for that but not for the other Harpys. I wish you the best of luck in geting an answer from a mobo manufacturers. I think I'm 0 for 15 lifetime so far. I was wondering why you were going with that specific RAM but this confirms that there is a method to your madnes.

If I do end up geting a somewhat stunted clone of your system the first thing I wanna run on it is Pong. Anyone know if you can download a multithreaded Pong to work on Vista Biz?

Oh, and OlSkoolChopper, you asked about the HR-01-X: I don't know about fitting them in a vertical position (wider side oriented like |), but I'm sure they'll fit in a horizontal position (-), which means I'd expect the following setup to be possible:



If a fan was placed on at least one of those (preferably both), there would be a vertical wind tunnel, aided by the air intake that the TJ10 has and the hot air would be exhausted by the 120mm top case fan that is located directly above the two CPU sockets. that would be one good way to cool these CPUs.

Yes, there's a method to my madness.

My madness whispers quietly in my ear... "Kingston Part number KVR800D2D8F5/1G, remember...

Also, I was checking about Quadro video cards and I found some at accessible prices. What would be the advantages of getting a quadro series video card instead of, say, a 8800GT?... Anyone has any ideas on that?...

One more thing for those who think this is a lot of money for one mortal like myself: this is not a computer for me. It's for a professor that I'm helping out here and the money for this will be from a research grant. I wish I had the money for this rig though. I think I'd probably throw firefox and a bunch of other apps directly to memory automatically as soon as the OS goes online, and load times would be instantaneous... too bad RAM drives are as expensive as this... drool

Quadro allows hardware acceleration in professional design programs like those from AutoDesk. The difference it makes in AutoCAD is astounding, my school's P4 setups have hardware acceleration and run as smooth, if not more smooth then my Core2Duo setup that lacks it. If you do work with design programs or image rendering you might want to check if a Quadro or FireGL has acceleration supported by the programming; it can really help!

I just sent my OS support question to Tyan. I hope they answer.

Well, I'm fairly certain that RHEL and maybe SuSE Enterprise will be supported. If Ubuntu will work or not is another question though. One thought that crossed my mind is CentOS... which might work. But heck, how should I know???

yep. nice workstation.

The Tyan website at http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=560 states: "The latest Tyan DP server platform supports the 45nm Quad-Core Xeon 5400 series processors and the 5400 chipset (Seaburg). The Tempest i5400PW S5397 features (16) sixteen DDR2 FBDIMM slots, (2) two Gen2 (x16) PCI-E expansion slots that can either support an I/O expansion card or a graphic card; while also supporting front side bus speeds of 1600/1333MHz." It seems that it is 45nm compliant. However, I am not seeing any information with regards to OS compatibility. I don't believe it would be a problem with my application of Vista Ultimate, but it may be with various flavors of Linux, et al.

Those HR01Xs look perfectly happy on that board. I'll bet two Tuniq towers wouldnt be anywhere possible on that though! Great idea about the verical wind tunnel. I'll bet that would keep those Harpies at 35C under load! I understand that the Tyan has been certefied to run with that Kingston RAM but would there be any reason to beleive that other similar FBDIMMs would create a problem with that mobo? I wouldnt even consider a Quadro as I dont do any AutoCAD and likely the 3d software Im gonna buy is gonna be more mainstream in nature than specialized workstation type stuff, so it will be perfeclty well suited to working with the 8800GT. Is tehre any way to find out how to OC this sucka? "Ya, I've got an octocore and I've OCd it cuz I NEED MORE POWER!"